Drawing Lines with the World

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

So it can be a challenge sometime to know where to draw lines. I think that’s one of the difficult things about being an adult is to know where to draw lines. You know, we see this in parenting.

You don’t want to be an ogre and jump on every little thing your kids do wrong. I mean, you might have to correct them and say, hey, stop that. But you don’t want to jump on them and ground them and whoop them for every single infraction.

But at some point, there comes a point where you let it go too far and things get out of control. So you have to know where that line is. Part of the difficulty there, too, is that it’s different with each child.

You know, what works with one child doesn’t always work with another. They’re all different. God blesses them and curses us with them each having their own personalities.

It can be that way in many things in life. Where do I draw the line? You know, you might be shopping for car insurance.

and they quote you a price that’s just way too high. $200 a month for that vehicle. No, that’s too high.

Well, what about $150? Well, that’s too high too. What about $125?

Maybe. Where’s the line? You know, where is that line where they go a penny over and they’ve just pushed too far?

All throughout life, we have to draw lines. And one of the hardest places to do that is in issues where our faith intersects the world around us. You know, where do I draw the line?

What can I participate or what should I participate in that’s going on in the world around me? Where should I draw those lines of what I will and won’t do when it comes to representing Jesus in the choices that I make? We’ve probably all in this room faced a circumstance where we had to draw a line.

And maybe you struggled with drawing that line. I know that people have struggled because all throughout my ministry, I’ve gotten questions like, my job wants me to do this. Can I, as a Christian, do this?

A family member is having this activity or this ceremony. As a Christian, what should I do? I face this dilemma at school.

As a Christian, should I speak out? Should I write this paper? Should I push back on this?

We all face these issues and these questions where our faith and the culture we live in, where those things butt heads, we’re going to be called on to draw lines. And it’s not always easy to know where those lines are. But where we draw the lines, those things matter.

That was the question that Paul dealt with when he got to 1 Corinthians 8. If you’re a guest with us this morning, we’re glad you’re here. We’ve been studying through the book of 1 Corinthians, and this morning we’re finally up to chapter 8.

Paul is addressing some of the things that were going wrong with the church at Corinth, and one of the issues was that they were not drawing many lines at all. They weren’t even thinking about these issues. And so Paul wrote to them to clarify what they needed to be doing.

In their specific case, it was dealing with idol worship. Now, that’s not a circumstance that we really deal with. nobody is calling me or coming by the office and saying, hey, should I eat food that was offered to these little statues or not?

That’s not really a thing that we deal with because of the culture we live in. And yet there are other ways in which our culture is hostile toward the teachings of God’s Word. And it’s on those issues that we need to know where to draw the lines.

Even though the specific issues are different from what they dealt with in Paul’s day, we can take principles from God’s Word that the Holy Spirit spoke through Paul to the church at Corinth and we can apply those to our situations today even though the situations look a little bit different. And so we’re going to look at what was going on with the church at Corinth and what Paul told them they ought to do. And part of the problem that the church at Corinth had in dealing with idols, and we’ll get into that in just a moment, but part of the problem that they had was their attitude toward the questions that were coming up and the lines that they were being expected to draw.

And their attitude, as one commentator said, was not one of, can we do this? I’m sorry, it was, they were not taking a position that says, can we, is this okay? But it was more of a position of why can’t we?

And there’s a subtle difference there, but it’s a difference nonetheless. It’s one thing for us as Christians to come to God’s Word and say, can I do this? Is this something that I’m able to do?

Is this something that glorifies God? It’s an entirely different situation when we come to God’s Word and say, well, why can’t I? Because in that case, we’ve already sort of made up our minds that we want to, and we really don’t care at that point what God’s Word says.

We’re going to look for a way to justify what we want to do. And so I want us to look this morning at 1 Corinthians chapter 8 at the correction that Paul offers to the church at Corinth. Like last week, we’re going to go through the whole chapter together, but unlike last week, this is 13 verses instead of 40.

So not as much. Benjamin told me last week listening to that was like drinking from a fire hose. I said, have you done that a lot, son, that I need to know about?

Anyway, so we have time and space to go a little more in depth today than we did last week. 1 Corinthians chapter 8. Once you turn there with me and once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, out of respect for His Word.

If you don’t have your Bible this morning or can’t find 1 Corinthians 8, it’ll be on the screen for you. Let’s look at these 13 verses where Paul addresses their liberty in Christ and the lines that they needed to draw. He says, now concerning things sacrificed to idols, We know that we all have knowledge.

Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by him.

Therefore, concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, but that there is no God but one. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is 1 God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we exist for Him, and 1 Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through Him. However, not all men have this knowledge, but some, being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.

But food will not commend us to God. We are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat. But take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

For if someone sees you who have knowledge, dining in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be strengthened to eat things sacrificed to idols? For through your knowledge, he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whose sake Christ died. And so by sinning against the brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, it will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.

And you may be seated. This ties in a little bit with what Paul wrote in Romans about the weak brother and the strong brother and our convictions. The difference being that in that case in Romans, Paul is talking about the way we relate to the Old Testament law.

and talking about our consciences there, and talking about making choices one way or another for the sake of our brethren who have different convictions because they came from this Jewish background that Paul came from. In this case, Paul talks about similar things. He talks about those who are weak, but his argument is a little bit different because here he’s dealing with the Corinthian paganism that he gives no accommodation to.

He doesn’t make any position of saying, well, take the middle road, it’s okay here, because he’s dealing with pagan gods. In Romans, he’s dealing with people who are still struggling with coming out of the bonds of the Old Testament law. And he talks about making a combination for the weaker brethren, the ones who aren’t there.

Here, Paul draws clearer, darker lines in between what’s acceptable and what’s not. A couple of things that I want to clear up just to begin with. toward the beginning of this, here in verse 5, he talks about so-called gods.

In heaven or on earth, indeed there are many gods and many lords. He’s not saying here that many gods and many lords actually exist. The Bible is clear from front to back that there’s one God, there’s one true and living God. And yet in the world there are idols that exist in the imagination of mankind.

That’s what he’s talking about, gods of people’s imagination. There are even other spiritual beings, angels, demons, spirits of those kinds, created beings made by God that the world will look at and claim that they’re gods. And so Paul is saying there may be other things out there real and imaginary that people look to, but there is no other God besides the one outlined in Scripture.

And he refers to one God who he says is the Father in verse 6. And in verse 6 he also says, one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things and we exist through him. I won’t belabor this point too much this morning, but Paul is clear enough in his other writings that we know here Paul is not saying that Jesus is less than the Father.

That is not what he’s saying. He’s making a point, I believe that that’s how we have a relationship with the one God, is through the Lord Jesus Christ. Not to draw a distinction and say Jesus is not God or he’s less God than the Father. So he makes these arguments about idolatry, about the worship of these false gods, of these idols, these spirits, these things that people concoct in their imaginations.

And it all points us to the fact that the world can be enticing to our flesh. Even as believers, there is sometimes a very real pull to our flesh from the old ways of living. For the Corinthians, that meant their pagan worship.

Corinth was a center of pagan worship. Before we get into a verse-by-verse discussion, it helps us some background to understand of what was going on here. And the Corinthians, their city was a center of pagan worship.

When we talk about the Bible Belt here in America, if that’s still a thing, when we talk about the Bible Belt, there are various places that claim the title of being the buckle of the Bible Belt. And people say that because of the number of churches that are there, the number of ministries that are there, the prevalence of Christian teaching that’s there. sometimes Christian organizations and Christian broadcasting entities.

They’ll talk about places like Tulsa. They’ll talk about places like Nashville, different places, and say that’s the buckle of the Bible belt. Well, if there was a paganism belt in the Roman Empire, Corinth would have been one of the buckles on that paganism belt.

That was a center of idol worship where people would travel from far and wide to come to these massive temples and to participate in these elaborate ceremonies. It was very much woven into the culture of what it meant to be a Corinthian. And so you have these people who were in the church.

Most of them were not like Paul, who had come from a Jewish background. Most of them had been saved out of paganism. And the problem for them was that the entire social fabric of the community was wrapped up in paganism.

If you wanted to interact with other people, you went to the temple. If you wanted a social life, it revolved It’s like a few generations ago when the church was the center of social life for small communities. And people would go there.

That’s where their families and just the community were centered around the church. Or sometimes today you’ll go to a rural community and the social life of the community will be centered around the local school. There’s that center of gravity where everything comes back to.

For Corinth, it was the temple. it was the pagan temple and so if there were going to be if there was going to be business transacted sometimes it might happen in the in the feasting rooms of the pagan temples if there were ceremonies if there were baby dedications if there were weddings if there were funerals if there were celebrations of any kind it would take place in the context of these temples if you were a christian then it was a very very good likelihood that all your neighbors all your family members all your friends, all your business associates went to the temple and you’ve come out of that. That’s what you’ve known all your life.

And you might kind of feel lost without it. The last time I missed Sunday morning church that I, other than being sick, was on mine and Charlie’s honeymoon. And we had talked about getting up and going to church somewhere in Amarillo as we were headed out toward New Mexico.

But after the stress of the wedding and everything, I overslept. I slept straight through my alarm. We got up.

It was too late to go to church, too late to go to lunch. I’m like, what do people do with themselves on Sunday mornings? Because I’ve grown up since the womb going to church on Sunday morning.

I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if suddenly church wasn’t a thing. That’s where they found themselves. Disconnected from the temple, disconnected from everything that connected them to their communities.

And there was a pull back there for those community reasons, for those social reasons. Now they may not believe in the pagan gods anymore, but why can’t I go to the temple? Especially when that’s where the feasts are.

That’s where everything cultural that’s going on in the community is taking place. Why can’t I be back there? It was a powerful pull to go back there.

And at these temples they would offer sacrifices to the gods, the pagans would, and then the food would be shared out by the worshippers afterwards. And the feast itself was not necessarily a religious activity. all right just like our potlucks I mean we say a prayer at the beginning but then we sit down and eat and we’re usually talking about things going on in our lives what happened last week what’s coming up this week did you see that game did you did you hear what that that politician said on the news we’re just talking about stuff and it’s not necessarily church but you can’t escape the fact that there’s the influence of it being part of the church that hovers over that gathering.

The same thing. Let’s go to the temple. We’re just there because our family’s there.

It’s family game night at the temple. I don’t have to join in the pagan worship. You couldn’t escape the reality of the pagan worship and the recognition of the pagan deities hanging over that.

So even if someone just came from the food, it was difficult to escape the influence of the pagan worship. And so Christians were drawn toward this for social reasons, even though Christianity emphatically rejects idolatry, emphatically rejects paganism. It is a non-negotiable that there is one God who has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. There is one God.

It’s not even that there are many and we just worship one. That’s why don’t be confused by what Paul says, for us there’s one God. He’s not saying, well, that’s our truth, you live yours.

He’s saying we understand there’s only one God. It’s a non-negotiable. And in spite of that, the Corinthians were facing the temptation, this enticement to at least go back to their old surroundings, if not their old activities.

They felt this enormous pressure, internal and external. The family, the neighbors, the friends saying, Why don’t you come on back to the temple? Stop being one of those weird Christians. Just come back.

Just hang out with us again. As well as the internal pressure of saying, you know, this is what I did my whole life up until Jesus. And so they would look for reasons to justify why it was okay to go back and participate in the feasts at the temple.

I mean, looking at what they’re struggling with, we can understand. I’m not saying we agree, but we can understand why this is such a powerful pull We can understand why they might struggle with, maybe I should go back to this, at least just to be around it. And so they would find reasons to try to justify it, and that’s what Paul is addressing here.

We can easily do the same thing. When we look at who we were before Jesus, there may be an enticement there that our flesh has not completely escaped. We think, oh, you’re a Christian, you shouldn’t struggle with these things, you shouldn’t be tempted by these things.

and yet we still have this fleshly sin nature that as long as we are here on this earth we’re going to have to contend with and sometimes the world pulls that where the spirit is willing to walk with the lord but the flesh is weak and so there are these enticements and they were tempted to let their freedom in christ be a justification for things that would undermine their witness but our freedom in christ is not a justification for those things we cannot use our freedom in christ as a justification for anything that’s going to undermine our witness.

And when I say freedom in Christ, again, much of the teaching in the early church dealt with this tension between the Old Testament law and the new covenant that we have with Jesus Christ. And if you’re not a believer this morning, if you’re here with somebody, somebody brought you here, this is all new to you, even if you’re a new Christian, you may be looking at Christianity and say, wait, freedom in Christ, hold up. You’re not under a bunch of rules that completely goes against everything we’ve been taught about Christianity. But look in contrast at the old covenant that many people in early Christianity had come out of.

The life that Paul grew up in, in Judaism, the Old Testament laws. We could not keep the laws of the Old Testament perfectly if we tried. And even the people that the Old Testament law, that they tried to keep it, the Pharisees who built rules upon rules upon rules to try to protect their keeping of the law.

Jesus looked at them and said, that’s all well and good, but inwardly you’ve still broken the law because of the condition of your hearts. That Old Testament law, we could never ever keep it. And now because Jesus has fulfilled the demands of the law, we are suddenly free from those things as a means towards salvation.

Our freedom in Christ means that there are many things that we could do without forfeiting the grace of God. That they were in danger of walking away from their covenant in the Old Testament. It doesn’t mean, by the way, that the Old Testament is worthless.

The moral law as it reflects God’s character still reflects God’s character today. And many of those teachings are reaffirmed in the New Testament. So we don’t want to just completely ignore the Old Testament law, but we understand that’s not our criteria for salvation.

And a lot of those ceremonial laws and civil laws that apply to Israel, we’re out from under that burden. And there’s a new covenant with Christ. And so they would look at this freedom, this sudden explosion of freedom and say, well, if I can, why not? And they would try to justify themselves.

They might argue from their spiritual wisdom. We see this in the first three verses. Paul says, we know that we all have knowledge.

That’s because the Corinthians were very likely telling Paul and others like him, you know, we’re spiritually wise. That’s an argument they’ve made all throughout the earlier chapters of this book. We’re spiritually wise.

We know lots of things. Surely, if this was harmful, we’d know it. I think we’re smart enough to figure it out.

It’s kind of their attitude. Paul says, look, we all have knowledge. We all have spiritual knowledge.

We’re all smart people here. But knowledge makes you arrogant. And here he’s talking about human knowledge.

Your knowledge will make you arrogant. Instead, you need to be motivated by love. Love edifies.

If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he is not yet known as he ought to know. Paul says, you know a lot of things, Corinthians, but you don’t know them the way you ought to. You haven’t quite figured out what you’re supposed to do.

They were arguing, hey, we have the spiritual wisdom to be able to withstand these things. I can go to the temple. It’s not going to affect me.

They would argue from the nature of God. We know God. We understand God.

these pagan gods are not a draw for us anymore. Now, as we’ll see in a moment, Paul argues it’s really not about how it affects you. Although it would affect them, Paul makes the argument of how it affects others.

Then we come to verses 4 and 5. They argued about the powerlessness of the idols. And one of the Corinthians might have told Paul, you know, they’re just statues.

If we don’t believe they’re really gods, if we don’t believe they really have this power, if we believe in Jesus, why do we care about the statues? It doesn’t matter. And Paul says, we know things sacrifice to idols.

We know there’s no such thing as an idol. There’s no other God, but for us, there is one. And so he wanted them to make sure that what they were doing conveyed to the world that they understood there’s one God.

In verse six, we see that they, they, they very likely argued that going to the temple wouldn’t affect their worship of the one true God, because his answer to them is yet for us, there is but one God, the Father from whom are all things and we exist for Him, and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things and we exist through Him. So they could say, we can go to the temple a little bit. It’s not going to affect our worship of God.

And His response to them is, do you really understand who God is? If you’re saying, well, I can go do a little bit of paganism because I know who God is, that tells me you don’t understand who God is. If you’re saying I can go do a little paganism and He’ll be fine with it.

Tell me you don’t understand the God of the Bible without telling me you don’t understand the God of the Bible. That’s it right there. And so they were looking for ways to justify themselves, and Paul addresses each of those, and he argues that nothing that they were pursuing, he argues in response that nothing they were doing was, nothing that they were pursuing was worth the damage it was going to do.

What would they get if they went to the temple? They’d get food, They’d get social connections. They might have a good time.

They might build connections in business. They might get the approval of their families. There were certainly things that they were pursuing by wanting to go to the temple, but none of those things were going to be worth the damage that they were going to inflict on these people and others.

In verse 7, he tells us how some people would see them eating at the idol feasts and not know that they didn’t recognize the power of the idols. He says, however, not all men have this knowledge, some being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol, and their conscience being weak. He says to the Corinthian Christians, somebody is liable to see you, maybe a newer Christian who’s just been saved out of paganism, maybe somebody who’s still a pagan and under conviction of the gospel, but somebody’s going to see you in the temple.

They’re not going to understand the mental gymnastics you’ve just gone through, and they’re going to look at it and say, well, he’s fine with paganism. I guess you can worship Jesus and Jupiter at the same time. Must be fine, because that guy did it.

And it wasn’t the food itself. Now, Paul elsewhere deals with the question of food offered to idols. But he says here in verse 8, food will not commend us to God.

We are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat. He said the food itself does nothing to affect your relationship with God. It’s not going to move you closer to God or further away from God either way, whatever you do.

It’s not the food itself. But we have to be cautious about how our choices affect others because he says in verse 9, but take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block for the weak. The physical food is not going to do anything to you spiritually, but the physical food you eat could do something spiritually to the person who’s watching you.

And when Christians engage in behaviors that give the impression we approve idolatry, verse 10 says we give them the impression that it’s okay to pursue idolatry. We encourage idolatry through those things. For if someone sees you, verse 10, who have knowledge, if someone sees you with all your spiritual wisdom, they see you dining in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be strengthened to eat things sacrificed to idols?

So this is part of where we draw the line. if what we do gives the impression to somebody else that something that is against God’s word is okay then it becomes sin for us because we’re encouraging somebody else to do something that God’s word says is not okay and he’s even clearer in the next few verses that leading people astray into sin is destructive to them and it dishonors the sacrifice that Jesus made on their behalf he said for through your knowledge he who is weak is ruined if you eat in the temple leads somebody else who’s weaker to go back to paganism or stay in paganism, then you’ve messed up his life and you’ve dishonored the sacrifice that Jesus made. Jesus paid the highest possible price for that soul and now you’ve just pushed him back the opposite direction.

Doing this, he says, is a sin against Christ in verse 12. And so by sinning against the brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak. You sin against Christ. It makes us responsible.

We don’t like to think about this in our world because we as a society are very individualistic. We make our own choices. We’re responsible for ourselves.

Nobody else tells us what to do. At least that’s what we as Americans traditionally have tried to stand on. So we don’t like this, but what he’s teaching us here is that we become responsible not only for what we do, but for what we encourage others to do as well.

Now, ultimately, they’re responsible for the choices that they make, but don’t miss the fact that we become responsible for our part in encouraging them to disobey the Lord. And so Paul says it’s not worth it. Verse 13, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.

That’s not saying don’t eat meat. That’s not even Paul saying I’ve become a vegan. That’s Paul saying if me going to the temple and eating that food causes them to stumble, even though I can, even though I’m not going to lose my salvation by doing that, I’m going to make the choice for the good of those around me and for the furtherance of the gospel that I will never do that again.

And so where do we draw the lines? I thought about pulling out a bunch of situations that I’ve encountered, either in my own life or encountered through brothers and sisters coming to me for advice. But the reality is we each face different circumstances in our families, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our schools, in our social relationships, we face so many varying situations that I could not possibly begin to cover all of them.

And this will become more and more common as the culture becomes more and more hostile toward Christ. We face choices and having to draw lines that we didn’t have to draw 30 years ago. So instead, I’m going to give you the very general principle from this. Instead of how does this apply to each individual situation.

The very general principle is we draw the line at a place that either dishonors God and His Word or gives the appearance to somebody else that we’ve cited against God and His Word. Just for the sake of illustration, I will give you one example. I’ve had people in the last year say that there are members of my family that are involved in relationships that go against God’s Word.

Is it okay for me to invite them to holidays? And the answer I’ve given is yes, absolutely. Because you are demonstrating Christian, we all sin.

Me inviting people to my house for Thanksgiving, 4th of July, Arbor Day, whatever it is, does not give the impression that I approve of every choice that they make, right? I don’t even approve of every choice made by every person who lives in my actual house and eats at my table every day. I don’t always at the end of the day look back on it and approve of every choice I made throughout the course of the day and I still let me sit at my table.

Okay. So yes, as far as I, as far as I can tell, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no problem with that. I had a man come to me a few years ago and say, I’ve got a member of my family who is having a ceremony for a same sex union.

Should I go to that? And my answer to him was, are you okay with giving the impression that you approve that when the Bible says no? Where do we draw the line?

We embrace the family, the community, all the things that they were looking to connect with. We embrace those things. We want to be good friends and neighbors and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and children.

We want to be the most loving people in society that we can be up to the point where it gives the impression that we disagree with what God says. And here’s the reason for this. Not because it’s a set of laws, but for the reason that Paul addresses the Corinthians about this.

Because the pagans were more than willing to accommodate Jesus in their pantheon. You know, when you got five or six hundred gods, what’s one more? Just add another one.

If you want to worship Jesus, we don’t care. The Romans didn’t care that the Christians wanted to worship Jesus. The Romans cared that the Christians wouldn’t al